I Hate Social Media | The world today is known as a Global Village. Why?
This is because it has become effortless to communicate! Social media is a place to form connections.
But it can be very overwhelming and overpowering at times.
There are many reasons why people would say “I hate social media” or that they’re deleting social media off of their phones and tablets.
Because they don’t want to feel pressured into doing what the others are doing.
Or feel the anxiety of not living a good enough life as the others are.
Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, or any other platform.
People might feel the need to take a social media break because of all the time they waste on the internet.
According to an article, here are a few reasons that people had quoted when they were deleting social media out of their lives;
Reasons to Take a Social Media Break
- Ego
- Anxiety
- Waste of Time
- Addictive
- Zero Privacy
- Depression
- No Social Skills
- Too Mainstream
- Self-doubt
- Fake Identities/Personas
- Poor Reading Skills
- The Oh-So-Popular Trends
Ego
Some people believe that because of the followers on their platforms, social media tends to make people needier for attention.
Sometimes, it makes people take significant risks, possibly threatening their own lives.
People go to vast extents for popularity and fame on the internet these days.
Anxiety
Sometimes, posting can give people anxiety because they worry about what others may think of what they’re posting.
People get judged on what they wear, what they share, even on the selection of their memes.
Waste of Time
People on the internet spend so much time spreading negativity (majority).
It is not worth wasting time on!
Also, we stay attached all day to our phones, laptops, and whatnot; then we forget how to be social in real life.
Addictive
The people who have social media know that it can be pretty addicting, and sometimes may make you lose friends.
Social media is just another way to waste time without any reason, procrastinate if you will.
Going through someone’s Instagram for a whole day (stalker alert) or trying to get your favorite YouTuber to notice you on Twitter by tweeting constantly or retweeting and doing so on and on, it leads to people not doing what needs to be done, from cleaning their bedrooms, to even studying or preparing big projects all the night before.
Zero Privacy
Social media, according to me, allows a lot of nosy people to enter your life.
Basically, I don’t like to share. I do a blog on different occasions now and give an opinion here or there.
But I have literally gone hours and days without even turning on my cell phone.
I try to use it only for work and when I have to.
Even when I have signed up to yet another Facebook account, I forget to look because I don’t care, or don’t want to know what others are doing and don’t understand why they want to know about me.
All I can think to post of is MEMES!
You can always unintentionally disclose way too much even accidentally!!
I just got done with writing an old-fashioned letter to a friend who lived abroad, and it made me feel good to go black and white after so long!
There is more concentration, more profound thoughts, it is more personal, and more satisfaction with writing a good letter. Not to mention, being all in with being neat and careful.
It doesn’t matter if I do not get a reply right away? There are plenty of things to put my mind to.
Some people just don’t prefer to use social media because they simply don’t want to accord things from their personal world on the Internet.
Depression
Things that people post on the Internet might be confidence boosting pills for them, but they lead others to think how they don’t have things that you do.
Let it be friends or relatives or materialistic things.
People develop a sense of hate, resentment and this can get to extreme measures.
While people may share their achievement without the intent of hurting others mentally, they might strike up inferiority complex in others.
No Social Skills
In the real world, you should know how to communicate with strangers on a daily basis.
You do communicate regularly in businesses and meetings, etc., so if you are used to tapping your screen only, it will be really hard for you to go back to the real world and articulate using your opinions.
Texting and Calling DO NOT take place on an interaction that is done face to face.
It’s of course not equivalent.
Talking in real life is waaay better.
You can watch people’s reactions, feel their energy, and even smell people (EW! I know sometimes it is a worse alternative).
But the real-life interaction comes in handy for long-term relationships.
Too Mainstream
My point of having an online presence is to interact with stupendous, brainy and rational people and social media is all about the short-attention-span crowd who think that memes are the only way to live on the Internet and establish intellectual speech.
I don’t have the knack to follow people, I like to follow ideas and that’s not what you see on social media nowadays.
It’s not easy to describe in an uncomplicated way.
The best way to explain it is that a lot of people believe that one side is the right side and other is the wrong side when it’s not as simple as that.
Misquoting Oscar Wilde on the matter,
“Thinking like everybody else just means you’re probably wrong.”
I despise the idea that I’ve got to, no matter how serious of a matter it is, share the same point of view as everyone on my social circle.
Everybody has their own set of rules or things that they want to live by and set of insecurities, that might not be similar to mine.
Mostly, it feels like slavery. One must follow the social media, or they will be shunned! That’s not how positivity needs to be spread!
Self-doubt
You might start to think that the life others are leading is somewhat better in means of living than yours.
Forcing yourself to believe that what you feel is not perfection.
People feel like they are failures if they don’t have likes. That’s really sad!
It makes people think how they need to have a perfect body or perfect attire or the best car in town to be cool.
Social media promotes self-doubt in young adults, which in turn might cause depression.
They don’t think and know their self-worth.
Fake Identities/Personas
Makes people show a bogus face to the rest of the world. Wearing artificial smiles and adding up like reacts from others like social currency.
People share fraudulent information, generate fake profiles, lie about themselves and cover up their true identity.
90% of people on the social media platforms are indeed fake.
Poor Reading Skills
Liberal use of slang, colloquialisms, text speak, emoticons, and pop culture references is destroying the ability to communicate effectively verbally.
And there is the worrisome trend for some, people who like to intentionally utilize substitute spellings that are based on certain regional dialects that many find colorful and less annoying than writing intelligently (for example, stereotypical ebonies and redneck accents).
Not to mention the APPALLING use of grammar that’s used by a lot of people, and that adds up to the wrong usage of full stops, commas, let alone semicolons and colons.
The Oh-So-Popular Trends
“Even in 2018, we have been blessed (or cursed, depending on how you see it) with a myriad of new and exciting and disturbing trends.”
Better or worse is a debate for some other time, the blog right now shows how the trends took over the Internet by storm and inspired people to follow the same silly and weird patterns.
They weren’t even sure if the trends they followed looked any good on them, they just wanted to do it because they knew it was in.
Featured Article: 10 Steps to Create an Epic Social Media Campaign
How to Change the Narrative “I Hate Social Media”
Yes, I know the tone of this blog has been somewhat negative and a little daunting, maybe.
But this is the reality!
And, trust me, deleting social media is never a good option to avoid all this hocus-pocus.
Assuredly, there have been certain times in my life when I just run all out of my creative juice because I have been gauging my eyes at food porn or something else on my social media platforms.
And I don’t find a way to snap out of it!
That is when I need a social media break.
My body – my mind – and even my writing, sometimes, SCREAM of how addictive I have become to social media.
And the time we are living in makes it a taboo for us to even voice that.
People aren’t given the leverage to speak their mind about any depressing thing that they are facing, mentally or physically.
Just remember, let’s say that you’ve chosen a social media vacation to take your mind off things.
You wouldn’t be alone.
Taking a look at the stats;
32% of Facebook’s active monthly users choose not to log in every day
64% of Twitter users are inactive in a given month
65% of Google+ users are inactive in a given month
The vacation from social media —also popularly known as a social media cleanse —merely is taking a break from the social media!
Take a Break With Social Champ
Schedule all your posts on social networks & take a break from social media without getting lost.
In most cases, it’s “going a little time away from” rather than “leaving forever.”
Let’s talk about how we can reverse the “I hate social media” bandwagon.
Some measures can be taken to avoid a block in mind and just enjoy social media occasionally.
A social media rest can be done with ease.
First Things First, Learn to Say No, Even to Yourself!
I am a people pleaser, a “yes”- person by default.
If there is an unanswered message on your social media platform somewhere, doesn’t mean that you reply to them asap.
That way you’ll go in to reply but come out an hour later because you were busy surfing the newsfeed.
And you didn’t even reply to the message!
One of my biggest challenges is saying NOto others, no matter what the request.Social media presents a petition of opportunities to exercise saying no, or other alternates of the negative speech and it’s perfectly normal to say NO as often as you find yourself wanting to.
Secondly, You Can Always Let Your Schedulers Take Over for a While.
Social media can be overwhelming, but you don’t necessarily have to be deleting social media. If you are afraid that your followers might miss you, a simple technique might come in handy.
Schedule all your posts for a month or two through Social media scheduling tool like Social Champ, and go off to a social media vacay!
Keep in mind as you’re scheduling: You may not be encompassing to engage and reply the audience. Post content accordingly.
Thirdly, an Easy Way to “Take a Break” Is to Remove the Apps From Your Phone or Ipad.
I did this recently with Facebook due to all the messenger hoopla, and it was nice to only focus on Facebook when I had the time to dedicate to it and not feeling like I HAD to respond RIGHT NOW due to a notification.
Twitter and Instagram are a little easier for me on this front as their notifications seemingly aren’t so needy lol, so I still have those apps available – but I realized what an unexpected “relief” this was for me to remove one app simply.
Some Other Things to Try
It is difficult to avoid Facebook altogether as many service providers use it for Group activities so what is the next best thing is to use a timer – 15 minutes a day and not a minute more. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE!
Though sometimes one doesn’t need those 15 minutes which makes me wonder, perhaps there is an element of loitering around on social media too.
Sure the 15 minutes on Facebook go by a wee bit too fast. That’s where the timing and timer had to be supported with another strategy until I got into the discipline.
- The Bright Side
- Spreading Kindness & Social Awareness
- Educational Benefits
- Real World Skills
- Enhancing Creativity
- Confidence & Independence
- Interconnectivity & Identity
- Tolerance & Diversity
The Bright Side!
One research found that social media encourages teenagers who play video games extravagantly.
Heavy gamers who have a chain of friends on social media seem to do considerably nicer than those who play the games, and don’t have related social networks.
They seem to be less likely to endure feelings of depression and distress.
Spreading Kindness & Social Awareness
A teenager’s passion to learn new information, traverse new ideas, manifest themselves, and be connected with peers from the saimilar field has an intense impression on their social media combat.
They use numerous social networking sites, particularly Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, as a way of providing voice to the wordless.
Educational Benefits
Teenagers, nowadays, utilize social media platforms such as Facebook to achieve collaborative homework.
It provides a scope for them to share and debate ideas, plan and assign tasks, and upload and contribute feedback on completed works.
Also, social media itself can truly be an educational support – with social networking sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia being massively referenced as a reference of knowledge.
Real World Skills
Through using social networking sites, teenagers grasp in the knowledge to boldly communicate in a range of different social circumstances online, which is vital to their digital development.
Enhancing Creativity
Social media applies to online assistance that empower users to correlate with distinct users and create and share content.
One of the certain consequences of social media on youngsters is that it prompts them to think outside of the box and employ creativity in how they interlock with their audience and friends.
Confidence & Independence
Occupying engagements on social networking sites can be a dissimilar adventure for adolescent people.
It is like traveling to a new place where different crafts are needed.
Young people master to mold their style to be more bold and independent in order to be understood or have a definite online presence.
Interconnectivity & Identity
Social media is competent of producing and elongating teenagers’ personal and mutual identities.
During adolescence, youngsters have access to newfound self-containment and begin to form and experiment with new identities.
Tolerance & Diversity
Social media not only enables but urges teenagers to combine with other teenagers from different aesthetic, lingual, religious, and ethnic credentials – and explore a variety of assorted ideas.
This increases teenagers’ scope of endorsement and teaches them tolerance.
Summing Up!
Today’s youth are being influenced massively by new and authoritative resources. Social Media has grown in the age of the technology and the Internet.
It offers a way to keep in touch with new and old friends, network, follow brands and companies, and offers a mini-biography of each user’s life. The adoption of social media by young people has been a global phenomenon in recent years.
The influence of social media on young people’s peer groups has been extensive.
With everything positive, there is bound to be negativity as well. Adolescence is a time of change and the increasing influence of the peer group, and thus communication amongst peer group members is central to the identity of the individual.
It has also impacted the evolving relationships within the family; especially by the increased negotiating power social media gives to young people regarding curfews and safety issues.
This is precisely why the younger generation has started out the “I hate social media” campaigns. But then again, excess amounts of anything can be hazardous to your health, mental or physical and it is always recommended to step aside from social media for a while, to cleanse oneself off of all the negativity or peer pressures that they might go through!
While there are risks associated with social media, there are also numerous peremptory effects of social media on teenagers, and – with careful risk management and ongoing support and education.
Social media can be an entertaining, educational, and secure space for our children and teenagers. Spread positivity as much as you can; there can never be enough!
